On 6 August, Sylvia wrote her mother in some excitement over a short verse play, “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board,” later included in the notes section of The Collected Poems. She was suggestible and skeptical, indulging Ted in his occult occupations, which often had a materialistic motivation. He was a poet, like Sylvia, who thought a good deal about money and how to get it. To say that he had made an investment in Sylvia, this go-ahead American, may sound crass, but he loved her no less for it, and for being a canny woman who could figure out how to make five pounds go a long way toward paying their rent in Cambridge and feeding them as well. The Ouija board, in other words, became for both of them a conversation about how to generate capital, as it does for Sybil and Leroy in “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board.” Sybil is resigned to Leroy’s obsession with a “bare board” that has yielded contradictory results. Leroy wonders if perhaps Sibyl will be included in her white-haired benefactress’s will—a revealing gloss, perhaps, on why Sylvia was so assiduous about keeping open lines of communication with the wealthy Olive Higgins Prouty, and making sure that Prouty was among the first to meet Ted when he alighted on the American shore. “She was very amusing though she’s old now and her mind wanders a bit—still she’s plain and direct. I got on with her well,” Ted wrote to his sister, Olwyn.

“Dialogue” reveals a good deal about Hughes, who often portrayed himself as an amateur Plath shaped up for worldly competition. As Leroy, though, he is the one who wants to know from the Ouija spirit if he is to have his “fling at fame.” For Sibyl, the future is best left unknown. She is fixated on the afterlife and asks about her father, but she receives a garbled transmission. Though Leroy seems the more credulous of the two, Sibyl doubts his fealty to the supernatural, saying that if a bush began to speak to him he would kneel but then check for the wiring. “Dialogue” marvelously captures the playful, querulous strain in the pairing of these two sensibilities, who seem to agree in this instance that they are in thrall to imps, since neither Sibyl nor Leroy can believe that any major gods would come at the call of a glass maneuvered over a board. As Sibyl shrewdly points out, Leroy has no real need of spirits because, “You’d presume your inner voice god-plumed enough / To people the boughs with talking birds.”

Leroy teases Sibyl about her “inklings” of “doom.” He accuses her of opportunism—even when it comes to calling spirits, which she will placate if they prognosticate what she wants. It “pays to be politic,” Sibyl replies. The overlay of heroic lavender Plath used to scent Ted’s entrance into her life—not only in letters, but also in personal introductions of him to friends and family—is stripped away in the hard, if still good-natured give-and-take of “Dialogue.” Sylvia Plath had plenty of illusions about Ted Hughes, but she also had startling insights into the real man. After all, Sibyl calls the Ouija board “our battlefield.”

The piece ends with Sibyl and Leroy returning to the reality of their daily life. “[T]he dream / Of dreamers is dispelled,” he concludes. She wishes for the “decorum” of their days to “sustain” them, and he wants their actions to reflect that they mean well. As the lights go out, they make the same wish: “May two real people breathe in a real room,” perhaps a recognition of just how powerfully Sylvia and Ted could project their imaginations so as to create an unreal world. “Dialogue” confirms Oscar Wilde’s adage that art is a lie that tells the truth. Sylvia’s play seems so much more revealing than the performances Plath and Hughes put on in their letters.

Sibyl is, of course, the name of a prophetess, and Leroy is the cognomen of a king. Together the names signify the way these two poets mythologized themselves. With no evident trace of irony, Hughes remarks in his notes to The Collected Poems that his wife “mentioned flashes of prescience—always about something unimportant.” Did he not see the predictive value of “Dialogue”? Critic Jacqueline Rose notes that Plath “situates quite explicitly” in Leroy’s lines the “male invocation of poetry” associated with violence entering their room like an earthquake, turning Sibyl “ashen.” Like Hughes, Plath both venerated and dreaded the eruptive nature of his poetic gift and her own rage, which could erupt in response to it. In “Dialogue” Sybil ends their colloquy with spirits by smashing the glass.

About a week before the couple left Northampton for the fall semester at Smith, Ted wrote Olwyn the first of many scornful descriptions of an America wrapped in cellophane, “crapularised” into processed food that reflected a more general lack of texture in a “boundless” suburban uniformity, in which everyone was friendly in a facetious sort of way, but no one knew anyone’s else’s family history. He thought better of Northampton, which he had visited earlier in the summer when they were looking for lodgings. With its main street full of shops “huddled together,” it was “fairly English.” This letter and others demonstrate that Sylvia’s hope that Hughes would open up to America—which would in turn expand his poetic sensibility—was sadly mistaken. He associated affluence with inauthenticity.

In September 1957, Sylvia and Ted settled into an apartment in Northampton within walking distance of the Smith campus. On the surface (which is what Sylvia presented to her mother on 23 September), Ted was a considerate husband, making breakfast and doing the dishes. Sylvia had three classes and a total of sixty-five students, each of whom she would also be seeing in individual conferences. This work, plus department and general faculty meetings, would fill out her schedule.

Sylvia still found time to mull over in her journal ideas for several stories, including one about a woman who is shocked to discover that her poet-husband has not been writing about her, but about a “Dream Woman Muse.” Another story, set in Wuthering Heights country, is cryptically linked to Ted as a poet associated with decay and “aloneness.” This is perhaps Plath’s first recognition of his estrangement from an American scene that had separated him from the ghosts and spirits of his native land. Hughes’s letters reflect a sensibility ill at ease in surroundings that had no resonance or texture for him. Smith girls had a sort of machined beauty—“Chromium dianas,” he called them. “I sit for hours like the statue of a man writing,” he wrote to Lucas Myers in early October. “Two years will be our stretch in America,” he wrote, as though describing a prison sentence. Not even a visit to the Poetry Center cheered him, judging by his dismissive remarks about the dowagers and maidens who accosted him about his work.

By 1 October, Sylvia’s anxiety level seemed to peak. She had trouble sleeping, doubted her teaching abilities, deplored her lack of experience, obsessed over the perplexed expressions of her students—but most of all decried the demon in herself that demanded excellence when, in fact, she was “middling good.” Correcting papers exhausted her. She was ashamed to admit that she was afraid of not measuring up to Smith standards. She counseled herself to face reality, adopt a stoic face, and do her job as best she could. But of course, she could not leave it at that, admitting, “Not being perfect hurts.” Ted, more resigned to his teaching and unproductive writing regimen, admitted to Olwyn that life was pleasant, and he was in good humor, whereas Sylvia was “creaking under her burdens.” Sylvia complained to Warren on 5 November of a “rough class of spoiled bitches.” Her funk, she admitted, arose out of wanting to create her own metaphors, not discuss the ones in Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. Reading them was one thing; teaching them seemed to diminish her own creativity.

These words to Warren may have provoked Sylvia to take herself in hand. In her journal, she dismissed her complaints as those of a spoiled little girl. She deserved a good slap. She vowed not to weigh Ted down with her woes and to learn to live with her anxieties. Gradually, she pointed out to herself, she had learned to cope with her students, get enough sleep, write letters to friends, and finally do some baking. These small victories were confidence builders.